Don't suppose there is any way of animating outside of kimera... say blender or maya? I could whip up some fun stuff there. Also how much do we know about the animation data/format and how much can we screw with it?

I would love to be able to animate outside of kimera. It would be great to not be limited by the values and not have to worry about memory leaks and crashes after spending too long working on something.

Also, on topic, doing some experimenting I edited the animations for Cloud's attack, so now he takes a step back and then jumps instead of just instantly flying towards the enemy. I tried to make it transition a bit smoother.

Almost done with the main cast's idle animations, first alpha should be coming soon.

About battle anims, I'm experimenting with adding a "build up" to attacking, like FF8, how the characters prepare to attack (eg. squall raises his sword first, then starts running) but the "jump" sound still happens at the same time. Is there any way to make it happen after the prep animation is finished, or would editing the sound to have a delay be the only way (if that works at all)?

You would probably have to edit the sound. After doing all those experiments with 60fps, it seems that effects and sounds are trigger at the same time a particular animation is called. So if the attack animation is 8, as soon as the game executes 8, it executes the sound as well

so, padding the sound effect with a bit of silence at the beginning would work? sounds like a lot of work, since theres a lot of different sound effects. are any of the SFX used by the characters to attack shared by others? does every char have their own 'run' sound? If not, the next problem becomes making all 'ready' animations the exact same length.

Also this mod is impressive, because it addresses everything that caused me grief about the battle models in the field. The animations just were wonky for anything non-chibi. However, the world is still scaled for Chibis, but that is just a side note.

I can only hope someone makes it easier to alter animations, by either adding news ones, as well as being able to copy and paste whole animation sets between the existing models. As well as as a way to animate outside of kimera and just convert the file in. I've been wanting that for a long time.

Edit:

On a side note it's rather impressive to see how active you are across the bored. Thank you for your hard work. .

Just finished up first version Idle animations for the main cast, I'll release an alpha once I get the anims sorted together into the same package, and I'm not busy. Hopefully I can do it tomorrow morning before I leave.

But I'm totally down for editing the battle animations. The left shoulder rotates in awkward ways that doesn't work completely well for the proportions I use for my models. I'll read this and figure out how to correct that for New Canon Cloud

The idle animation is a looping animation, right? Basically the delay is approx. 1-2 seconds which would make me think it's the idle animationessentially, a walking NPC is instantly stopped ( tested in wutai accessory shop ) when you talk to them but then, as they are suddenly idle, the idle animation kicks in and runs once before the textbox pops up. what I assume is happening is that the game first detects idle, then plays the animation and then realizes that idle means to trigger a textbox.

I'm just some random bloody amateur when it comes to the finer workings of the engine so that up there is all assumption. It seems likely based on what I experienced in the many hours of messing with BG2, skyrim, oblivion, psx and snes mods but yeah, likely is just that :<

Kuugen is indeed correct. It seems some of the NPCs in Wutai, and perhaps other places, are set up so after their dialogue plays after the called animation is finished, instead of regardless like most NPCs. Since it calls the standing animation as soon as they start talking, it's unavoidable unless you remove cloud's standing animation from the pack. Most NPCs don't seem to do this though.

The only possible fix I could see for this would be changing how the dialogue is called, but I won't pretend to know anything about what you need to modify to do that.

It's not actually that big an issue. If anything, it kind of gives the impression that they finish up / put aside what they were doing to deal with your shopping needs. actually, thinking about it that way, it would probably look better if every npc did this

Got an update coming for this mod. I noticed my old anim changes didn't mesh well with some of the animations for cloud, so I have been editing a lot of those animations. Thanks to Borde's wonderful animation database addition to kimera, I've already fixed 97 individual animations so far, and I'll be doing more which I will probably release after my next battle scene pack.

I have fixed some of your animation already, mainly those, which had a wrong Y-value. I had also changed Clouds standing idle and his walking and running animation, because I have separated and connected his pauldron to the left collar-chest-bone.FF7Animation.rar